Page:Scott Nearing - Stopping a War (1926).pdf/32

 l'Humanité was able to report 117 arrests with numerous prosecutions instituted against other comrades. These prosecutions had been instituted in cities as widely scattered as Paris, Toulouse, Nancy, Tours, Saint-Etienne, Calais, and Lyons. On July 26 l'Humanité reported three comrades imprisoned for two weeks as the result of the calling of a shop meeting.

Late in September, the Secretary of the Central Committee of Action estimated that there had been about 400 prosecutions and something over 100 convictions. Leaders in the big cities as well as more obscure workers had been prosecuted, but with this difference: the leaders were ordinarily given suspended sentences, while unknown workers in the smaller towns were sent to prison for as long as six months for posting up bills denouncing the war and advising the soldiers to fraternize with the Riffians.

On Monday, October 12, 1925, the Central Committee of Action called a 24-hour general strike as a protest against the Moroccan War. The strike was particularly successful in Paris where it tied up the transport service and brought tens of thousands of workers to the streets in a vigorous anti-imperialism demonstration. 

The decision of the French workers to adopt these class conscious tactics marks a very important change in the attitude of the working class of Europe toward war. Heretofore, the European workers have been satisfied to carry on general propaganda during peace times and then, when war did break out, to fight patriotically for "victory" and "glory." Such tactics imply the acceptance of the economic situation out of which wars grow, and merely oppose each particular war as it arises without any effort to get back to its causes or to prevent it at the source.

The French workers who organized the campaign against the